TextMaker users -- ??? before I buy...

[Tye]

I'm right on the edge. That's a lot of money for a PPC program (and no rants on me being cheap. I am "frugal" and I *know* they put a lot of work into it).

1. Does TextMaker support the comments function of Word? If so, can you give me an idea of how it's implemented?

2. When Pocket Word is in landscape mode, it seems to have issues with rendering fonts correctly--especially with smaller fonts. Sometimes the cursor will appear in the wrong position and it's impossible to tell where your next letter will appear. Does TextMaker suffer from this same rendering problems?

I might think of more but those are the two that keep me up at night.

Thanks!
Tye

[Tye]

Oh yeah, it's on a 4705. I tried the trial but it expired and I didn't use those two features during the trial so now I can't find out myself ;)

[hamishmacdonald]

No, TextMaker doesn't support the Comments feature. Personally, I don't mind this, because I find the comments impossible to get rid of. (I recently submitted a short story to an anthology, only to realise that a friend's comments were still in the text -- ACK! I had to resend and ask them to ignore the original.)

TextMaker does, however, have a truly amazing feature-set. It's a full word processing program. I've had some glitches with it in the past, but the current version is very stable, and very good.

Pocket Word is a notepad, and TextMaker is a word processor. It's paid for itself several times over for me, simply because it allows me to create and read documents that are worth being sent to my editor and straight to our print department. My Pocket Word documents have to be fixed -- inch-marks replaced by smart-quotes, double-hyphens replaced by em-dashes, that sort of thing. Footers, page numbering, tables, graphics -- TextMaker has it.

It also works perfectly in Landscape mode, to answer your other question.

I appreciate the simplicity of Pocket Word, and in some ways find it less clunky than TextMaker. I'd love for MS to get it right, because I think the UI would be better. But in the meantime, I have no regrets about buying TextMaker.

[yankeejeep]

If you need a true word processor on your PPC, TextMaker is the only real option. While there are some desktop Word features it does not support, they are few. Aside from a somewhat idiosyncratic UI, it is an easy transition for Word users. It supports desktop Word documents in native Word format so you can turn off conversion and not fear losing format settings as files move back and forth.

I have had no issues in landscape mode (since ClearType really does not work in landscape, I would avoid the temptation to use a hacking app to turn it on). As is common in landscape, you may find a slight speed degradation. This is related to the process used to render the landscape display and not the apps themselves.

While TextMaker and its sibling PlanMaker are expensive for PPC apps, there are times that you definitely get what you pay for. The SoftMaker apps are about as close as you can get to seamless use of your desktop Office documents on your device.

[Tye]

Thanks, everyone! That was exactly what I needed to know.

[phs]

While TextMaker and its sibling PlanMaker are expensive for PPC apps, there are times that you definitely get what you pay for. The SoftMaker apps are about as close as you can get to seamless use of your desktop Office documents on your device.

It's really not that expensive if you don't have a desktop word processor. I purchased Textmaker for PocketPC only, and it came with a licensed Textmaker for windows. The windows version is a good alternative to OpenOffice.